Category Archives: Free Markets

The logic is as simple as it is foolproof. An “air-tight free-market argument,” as I explained: “If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, men as a group would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. That entrepreneurs don’t ditch men en masse for women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.” (“The Week of Whining Womin”)

The exuberant, America-First patriotism of President-elect Donald Trump is likely causing a chain reaction of sorts. Despite the gush and tosh from the deranged media, Trump has done nothing to pressure corporations to remain in the US—nothing but reiterate his campaign promises. But a powerful persona’s mindset is infectious, especially when coupled with the promise of a better economic climate. Trump is changing corporate hearts and minds about investing in America and its people. In order to frame this good thing as bad, the media have suddenly discovered a love of free-market capitalism. By triggering a change in corporate culture; Trump has the media louts decrying his assault on capitalism and his fostering of crony capitalism.

LOL: Free-market capitalism has been an “unknown ideal” in the US for a long time.

Ford is canceling plans to build a new plant in Mexico. It will invest $700 million in Michigan instead, creating 700 new U.S. jobs.

Ford (F) CEO Mark Fields said the investment is a “vote of confidence” in the pro-business environment being created by Donald Trump. However, he stressed Ford did not do any sort of special deal with the president-elect.

“We didn’t cut a deal with Trump. We did it for our business,” Fields told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
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The $700 million investment will go to the Flat Rock, Michigan plant to produce more electric and self-driving cars. Ford believes electrified vehicles will outsell gas-powered vehicles within the next 15 years.

Ford is planning to roll out seven new electric vehicles in the next five years, including a Mustang Hybrid.

This is a major U-turn for Ford. Trump repeatedly slammed Ford on the campaign trail for shipping U.S. jobs to Mexico (a claim the company said was wrong). The president-elect has kept up the pressure. Just hours before the Ford announcement, Trump criticized GM (GM) for producing cars in Mexico. All of the big car manufacturers currently have some production in Mexico. …

“We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That’s a lot of jobs; that’s a lot of new economic activity.” So intoned Hillary Clinton, during the first presidential debate at Hofstra University, New York, on September 26.

Where have we heard this before? Like Clinton, President Obama hasn’t a clue how a viable market is created and sustained. Solyndra, if you recall, was awarded $527 million from taxpayers. Each of the temporary, unsustainable jobs created by Solyndra and touted by Obama cost $479,000. Obama thought this was sufficient to secure a profitable market for the product.

Clinton is every bit the cretin when it comes to the market economy.

Donald Trump, however, is good at this; business is his bailiwick. He has spoken so well in interviews about the unviable nature of the green energy industry (unless, of course, it’s privately funded and the risk is neither subsidized nor socialized). Trump can’t allow the arrogant certitude begun with Obama and Solyndra to continue with Clinton.

For Trump understands how demand is generated and sustained. How many

times has he recounted on TV, for example, that so expensive are solar panels, that by the time these panels have paid for themselves—also known as “a return on investment”—it’s time to replace them? In a May appearance in Bismarck, North Dakota, on the occasion of his reaching and surpassing the magic delegate threshold (chronicled in “The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed”), Trump spoke eloquently about deregulating energy.

Clean coal can be restored, he remarked, if regulations are reduced. The money quote Trump should repeat, from that appearance: “Free-up coal and let the market work. Market forces are a beautiful thing.” Indeed they are.

Back to the larger principle:

When Clinton dares to mention the environment and how much money she’ll steal from you and me to enrich and entrench global bureaucracies who’ll adjudicate environmental affairs—Trump must bring it back to America First. And to immigration. …

Most Americans have zero understanding of free-market capitalism, and are interested only in government “protections,” namely the regulation of production, in the belief that government interference can reduce costs and get Big Bad Business to behave.

If only Americans, brainwashed in the nation’s government-controlled schools, understood the less intuitive truth and aimed the arrows in their quiver at Big Bad Government, the real bad actors.

In the case of the “EpiPen sticker shock,” bureaucrats at the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration)—beholden to keeping the bureaucracy alive, not getting innovation to market—practically gum-up the process whereby other makers of the product can enter the allergy antidote market and trigger competitive forces.

Then there are the patent grants of government privilege. By granting EpiPen makers patents for posterity—yes, this is government’s fault—these lengthy grants of patent privileges prohibit manufactures of generic drugs from entering the market to make comparable products.

… when was the last time that America’s chair industry hiked the price of chairs 400% and suddenly nobody in the country could afford to sit down? When was the last time that the mug industry decided to charge $300 per cup, and everyone had to drink coffee straight from the pot or face bankruptcy? When was the last time greedy shoe executives forced most Americans to go barefoot? And why do you think that is?

The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

If a chair company decided to charge $300 for their chairs, somebody else would set up a woodshop, sell their chairs for $250, and make a killing – and so on until chairs cost normal-chair-prices again. When Mylan decided to sell EpiPens for $300, in any normal system somebody would have made their own EpiPens and sold them for less. It wouldn’t have been hard. Its active ingredient, epinephrine, is off-patent, was being synthesized as early as 1906, and costs about ten cents per EpiPen-load. …